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Speaking of tomatoes -- all the tomatoes in that tube were beautfully colored, exactly the same shape and size. (And beefsteak variety, so nearly tasteless. That's a different issue.)

In the real world, tomatoes come graded. You pay a lot more if you want them all exactly the same size. They need to be washed, and frequently have woody stems that need to be excised. I didn't see that happening automatically.

And onions don't come pre-peeled in restaurant quantities. The pickle tube is going to jam. The condiments might signal you when they're out, but the nozzles are going to need a good cleaning.

I wonder if they're planning on going Juicero and selling their franchisees preloaded tubes.




And tomatoes can be difficult to slice; too ripe, and they splatter, making catsup in that nice, clear tube. Too tough and they bend the blades of your mandoline. Onions are even worse. They seem to have realized that lettuce won't be easy to cut (so they use shredded) but that will wilt/brown much faster.


When you buy a can of diced tomatoes, how do you think were they diced? Do you think it was done manually? I'm pretty sure slicing and dicing vegetables is a problem that has been solved at industrial scale a long time ago.


Industrial canned food production is a completely different scale compared to an automated restaurant. We're talking sorting, cutting, and packing machines each the size of the average McDonalds restaurant. Dont think its realistic to fit all of that in a drive through burger location


Anyone who's ever been to a Brooklyn deli can tell you none of those are that difficult: just run them through the deli slicer.


Its not automation if a human is standing there feeding the slicer and carrying it to wherever it needs to go. The hard part in automation is almost always material handling, not cutting.


Of all the things you could have taken from my comment, you came up with that? You seriously thought I was advocating having a human run laps around the machine with a deli slicer?

Clearly, the observation was, just make the cutting mechanism work like a deli slicer, as opposed to a knife or whatever else the OP had in mind.


Do you know what a knife is? A blade with a handle. Do you know what a deli slicer is? A blade with a bigger, heavier, mechanized handle.

Clearly the observation is that these robots are blades that dont need handles because they do everything a handle-using human does without requiring an actual handle. See what I'm getting at? You're telling them they should use a better handle when handles have nothing to do with the actual subject at hand.

The hard part is picking up the vegetables and moving them without damaging them, filtering out the product that went bad after QC at the farm, measuring how much force to apply to both ends to keep it from falling apart, keeping an eye on gunk and cleaning it before it becomes a mechanical problem or food safety hazard, and on and on. You know, the things that you need humans for, not deli slicers.

That's what the OP had in mind. Not what kind of kitchen utensil to use.


Um, do you know what a deli slicer is? Hint: they don't typically have handles.

Seriously, go back and read the original post. It's all about how hard it is to cut various vegetables. Not the stuff you mentioned. Think you better calibrate, son.




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